But for John Graham-Cumming, the author of science history travel guide The Geek Atlas, the pitch makes perfect sense. That’s because he’s trying to take an 1837 design by Charles Babbage and make it a reality.

Babbage, sometimes called the father of computing, came up with two main ideas for computers. The first, a difference engine, was effectively a particularly powerful calculator that performed dedicated functions.

The second, the analytical engine, was designed to be programmable through punchcards, meaning the computing power could be used for any purpose. There were three types of cards covering arithmetical operations, numerical constants and load & store (ie mechanical) operations: between them, the three types effectively made a complete programming language.

Unfortunately for Babbage, he was unable to get public funding for the machine and he never made a working model. (That makes the current appeal’s timing particularly ironic given reports that the British government plans to cut university research by around US$1.5 billion from next week.) While the Science Museum in London later built the differential engine, to date only a section of the analytical model (pictured above) has ever been created.

To show how ahead of his time Babbage was, it wasn’t until the 1940s that computers matching the characteristics of the analytical engine were first manufactured.